Project builds bridge between Greek growers and public administration

A commercial platform called RECAP, has been launched to support the existing Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), to better serve growers's systems for sustainability. RECAP includes manual and fully automatic hybrid Earth Observation techniques that are built upon existing large volumes of geo-information available to public organisations, integrating additionally open satellite data, and bi-directional user-generated data from farmers.

"A number of challenges have arisen for the public administrations (PAs) in the process of implementing and controlling Cross Compliance Scheme (CCS), mainly because of the complexity and diversity of the obligations and conditions that need to be monitored. This results in high administrative costs, and the bureaucratic procedures for monitoring farmers’ compliance to standards are time consuming. On the other hand, farmers face particular difficulties in becoming familiar with the standards required for their farm, which might lead to non-compliance and subsequent penalisation of the farmer, who is meanwhile dealing with the high administrative costs of the proper compliance to these standards," according to Ag consultant Manolis Tsantakis, from Etam SA.

"As RECAP is a user-driven solution, its approach started by developing a rapid appraisal methodology for the identification of specific users’ objectives and needs; followed by evaluation, using both quantitative and qualitative techniques for higher reliability and integrity. From the project initiation, a series of interviews with representatives from PA's, agricultural consultants and farmers were performed in five countries (Greece, Spain, Lithuania, Serbia and UK) and this procedure helped identify variations in the interviewees’ responses with regards to users’ requirements. Direct engagement of various groups of end users in semi-structured interviews was also followed in the co-creation and co-production phases," explains Tsantakis.

The idea behind RECAP, an EC project, funded under the ICT-enabled open government (H2020-INSO-2015-CNECT) call (GA 693171), is to help build bridges between public administrations and farmers by utilising innovative Earth Observation (EO) solutions and cost-efficient tools that improve simplification and modernization of the CAP.

For more information:
Manolis Tsantakis
Etam SA
Tel: +30 2810 361242
Fax: +30 2810 361152
Email: [email protected]
www.etam.gr